The Little Friend

“If you don’t want to lend it to them, you should tell them they can’t have it.”

Harriet’s mother looked a bit surprised. For a long strange moment, the two of them looked at each other.

Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “What day do you want to drive to Memphis and buy your school clothes?” she said.

“Who’s going to fix them?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Ida always hems my school clothes.”

Harriet’s mother started to say something, then shook her head, as if to clear it of an unpleasant thought. “When are you going to get over this?”

Harriet glared at the carpet. Never, she thought.

“Sweetheart … I know you loved Ida and—maybe I didn’t know how much.…”

Silence.

“But … honey, Ida wanted to leave.”

“She’d have stayed if you asked her.”

Harriet’s mother cleared her throat. “Honey, I feel as bad about it as you do, but Ida didn’t want to stay. Your father was constantly complaining about her, how little work she did. He and I fought about this all the time over the phone, did you know that?” She looked up at the ceiling. “He thought she didn’t do enough, that for what we paid her—”

“You didn’t pay her anything!”

“Harriet, I don’t think Ida had been happy here for … for a long time. She’ll get a better salary somewhere else.… It’s not like I need her any more, like when you and Allison were little.…”

Harriet listened, icily.

“Ida was with us for so many years that I guess I sort of talked myself into thinking I couldn’t do without her, but … we’ve been fine, haven’t we?”

Harriet bit her upper lip, stared obstinately into the corner of the room—mess everywhere, the corner table littered with pens, envelopes, coasters, old handkerchiefs, an overflowing ashtray atop a stack of magazines.

“Haven’t we? Been fine? Ida—” her mother looked around, helplessly—“Ida just rode roughshod over me, didn’t you see that?”

There was a long silence during which—out of the corner of her eye—Harriet saw a bullet she’d missed lying on the carpet under the table.

“Don’t get me wrong. When you girls were little, I couldn’t have done without Ida. She helped me enormously. Especially with …” Harriet’s mother sighed. “But for the last few years, she hasn’t been pleased with anything that went on around here. I guess she was fine with you all but with me, she was so resentful, just standing there with her arms folded and judging me.…”

Harriet stared fixedly at the bullet. A little bored now, listening to her mother’s voice without really hearing it, she kept her eyes on the floor and soon drifted away into a favorite daydream. The time machine was leaving; she was carrying emergency supplies to Scott’s party at the pole; everything depended on her. Packing lists, packing lists, and he’d brought all the wrong things. Must fight it out to the last biscuit.… She would save them all, with stores brought from the future: instant cocoa and vitamin C tablets, canned heat, peanut butter, gasoline for the sledges and fresh vegetables from the garden and battery-powered flashlights.…

Suddenly, the different position of her mother’s voice got her attention. Harriet looked up. Her mother was standing in the doorway now.

“I guess I can’t do anything right, can I?” she said.

She turned and left the room. It was not yet ten o’clock. The living room was still shady and cool; beyond, the depressing depths of the hallway. A faint, fruity trace of her mother’s perfume still hung in the dusty air.

Hangers jingled and rasped in the coat closet. Harriet stood where she was, and when, after several minutes, she heard her mother still scratching around out in the hall, she edged over to where the stray bullet lay and kicked it under the sofa. She sat down on the edge of Ida’s chair; she waited. Finally, after a long time, she ventured out into the hall, and found her mother standing in the open door of the closet, refolding—not very neatly—some linens that she’d pulled down from the top shelf.

As if nothing at all had happened, her mother smiled. With a comical little sigh, she stepped back from the mess and said: “My goodness. Sometimes I think we should just pack up the car and move in with your father.”

She cut her eyes over at Harriet. “Hmn?” she said, brightly, as if she’d suggested some great treat. “What would you think about that?”

She’ll do what she wants, Harriet thought, hopelessly. It doesn’t matter what I say.

“I don’t know about you,” said her mother, returning to her linens, “but I think it’s time for us to start acting more like a family.”

“Why?” said Harriet, after a confused pause. Her mother’s choice of words was alarming. Often, when Harriet’s father was about to issue some unreasonable order, he preceded it with the observation: we need to start acting more like a family here.

“Well, it’s just too much,” her mother said dreamily. “Raising two girls on my own.”